Donald Trump publicly embraced Dr. Ben Carson on Friday, accepting his former rival's endorsement and saying that the two men have apologized to each other for the slings and arrows they exchanged for months during an acrimonious presidential season.

'Yeah. Yeah,' he said during a morning press conference when DailyMail.com asked if mutual apologies had been offered.

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'We buried the hatchet,' Carson told reporters at Trump's sumptuous Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. 'That was political stuff. And that happens in American politics.'

'The politics of personal destruction, all that, it's not something that I personally believe in or anything that I get involved in. But I do recognize that it's part of the process. But we move on.'

He also said 'there's a lot more alignment philosophically and spiritually' between him and Trump 'than I thought there was.'

'That actually surprised me more than anything.'

The famed doctor said he 'prayed about it a lot' before finalizing his decision to endorse The Donald, and warned that allowing the Republican Party's elites to derail Trump's presidential ambitions 'would fracture the party irreparably, and it would hand the election to the Democrats.'

'And they would get two to four Supreme Court picks and America would be forever changed.'

Trump told DailyMail.com that he hasn't promised Carson a role in his potential administration, either as his running mate or in the role of a cabinet secretary.

Former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson listens at left, before announcing he will endorse Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a news conference at the Mar-A-Lago Club

'We're in the process of going off the deep end,' he warned. 'We're fiscally irresponsible. We're hating each other.'

Carson painted a picture of 'two Donald Trumps. There's the one you see on the stage and there's the one who's very cerebral.'

'I've come to know Donald Trump over the last few years. He is actually a very intelligent man who cares deeply about America,' he said. 'As they begin to see the real individual there ... we are going to begin to be comforted as a nation.'

Trump said he understands how people can see him as a split between public and private personalities.

'I probably do agree,' he said. 'There probably are two Donald Trumps ... there's a public version ... it's probably different from the personal Donald Trump.

In private, he said, 'I'm somebody that's a thinker. I'm a big thinker. And I have my ideas and they're strong, and typically they've worked out.'

Campaign allies now: Ben Carson talks with Donald Trump before announcing he will endorse him in Florida on Friday

Values: The religiously conservative Carson said that in talking with Trump he discovered that 'there's a lot more alignment, philosophically and spiritually, than I ever thought that there was.'

Carson's endorsement marks a new chapter in a tumultuous and sometimes standoffish relationship between the two men.

Trump was full of praise for the neurosurgeon during the early summer months of his presidential campaign bid.

But by mid-fall, when Carson had catapulted to the front of opinion polls in Iowa, Trump took off his boxing gloves and fought bare-knuckle style.

'Remember that Carson, Bush and Rubio are VERY weak on illegal immigration,' the billionaire tweeted on Oct. 25, lumping him in with the two Floridians in the race. 'They will do NOTHING to stop it. Our country will be overrun!'

Two weeks later he was singling out Carson for ridicule, following a sustained media frenzy over the doctor's unusual Biblical beliefs and controversial passages from his autobiography, 'Gifted Hands.'

You're with me now: Carson's outsider campaign soared last year but ultimately fizzled as he stumbled over questions about the veracity of aspects of his compelling life story

'With Ben Carson wanting to hit his mother on head with a hammer, stabb [sic] a friend and Pyramids built for grain storage – don't people get it?' he tweeted on Nov. 6.

A day earlier, he had hammered Carson in a damned-if-he-does, damned-if-he-doesn't proposition.

'The Carson story is either a total fabrication,' he wrote on Twitter, 'or, if true, even worse – trying to hit mother over the head with a hammer or stabbing friend!

By then, Trump had been on a month-long tear about Carson.

In a Mid-October appearance on 'The O'Reilly Factor' on the Fox News Channel, he let loose a trademark-Trump insult keyed to Carson's admission in the book that he had a 'pathological' temper as a teen.

'He hit a friend in the face with a lock. He tried to kill somebody with a knife and he said he suffers from pathological disease, okay?' Trump told host Bill O'Reilly.

'When you suffer from pathological disease, you're not really getting better unless you start taking lots of pills and things.'

A month later, Trump was still clobbering Carson along the same lines – but this time with a memorable twist.

'It's in the book that he's got a pathological temper,' Trump told CNN host Erin Burnett on November 13.